A Little Help to Get Back on Track

Back on Track


It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I last visited my first novel efforts. My last posting about taking my first draft novel off the publishing lists was about 5 years ago. A lot of things have been going on in my day job and personal life that have kept me distracted, including our firm being acquired, and more importantly, the loss of my dear mother. While the effects of both still linger, life goes on, and my dream of writing novels must as well.

I hope others will get enjoyment out of reading my novels, but there is joy in creating them for me as well. I’d pulled my first novel, “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” off the digital shelves when I realized it was riddled with unprofessional errors. Since then, I’d haphazardly tried doing some re-proofreading myself, but in my heart, I knew it wouldn’t be enough. I have this weird issue when proofreading my own work that causes my brain to read into sentences things that aren’t there, like missing words or missing ‘s’ or ‘ing’ parts of words. My odd mind just autocorrects what I’m reading and I breeze by things that need to be fixed. I can catch myself doing this at times, and made some proofreading progress, especially the parts where I used dictation software that created a lot of issues, but it wasn’t 100% accurate.

So after realizing I had my novel offline for such a long time, and after seeing much of what I thought could be in the world of Artificial Intelligence starting to come true in present day, I figured it was time to get this fixed. And to do this, I knew I needed some help, so help is what I sought after.

After searching for freelance proofreaders, I came upon an App called Fiverr that had all sorts of freelancers offering their services. Many more topics than just novel proofreading, but that was what I wanted, so after searching through the many fine proofreaders available, I settled on a gentleman named Victor Serrano, who specialized in Science Fiction and was a self-published author himself. While this was a bit of a cost for me, and I’m likely to have spent more on this than I may ever make on the book itself, it fulfilled a great need for me. This would allow me to get a novel I could be happy to present to the world without the distraction of so many errors.

Victor did a great job and in the end, I felt this was money well spent. He proofread my novel for typos and grammatical errors, and I also paid for the extra service of him pointing out issues with plot and consistency. The results were wonderful as he has a keen mind for proper formatting and reader experience. He pointed out a few glaring issues with the story that needed a little work to clarify and improve the reader experience, which were spot on, and I made changes to correct for. I have a bad habit of putting two spaces between sentences, which to me makes it more readable, but is not likely the standard, so I’ll still do that on this blog post, but I’ll have to watch out for that otherwise.

Other minor changes were for some word choices, some remaining typos and a few sentence structures, but the end result is a more professional manuscript. So given my name is on this, I’m very happy with the results now. I wasn’t warned, though, that Fiverr would hit me up for a “tip” payment after I approved his work, so my funds were already depleted for this project and I didn’t have any more to give. I’m not sure if it’s customary to tip for such services, or not, but Fiverr would surely have taken a piece of that, so likely they ask for that “customary” financial response on everything going through their platform. Had I known they’d ask for that, I may have chosen a less expensive route, so they should mention this up front.

All-in-all, I’m very happy with the process, and have cleaned up my first novel, “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” to the point that I’ve submitted this 2nd edition to Amazon.com for publishing. I’m just waiting for this to clear and then it will be available in ebook and paperback there once it’s gone through their checks. I’m very glad to be back on track as I’d held off on working on my second novel, “Burt’s Bots” for a long time now, as it didn’t make any sense while the first novel still had work needed to complete it. This has really sidetracked my writing efforts since proofreading wasn’t the part about writing a novel that I enjoyed, but a very necessary part of the overall effort. With the first novel now fixed and about to be re-published for this 2nd version, I’m now free to work on my next novel, which is a very liberating feeling.

Given this, I’m going to keep a little money to the side to avail myself of this service again as it’s very helpful to have a professional second set of eyes to go over my work and make sure it’s in as good a shape as it can be. I’ve learned from my previous experience that you don’t want to unleash your creation to the world until it’s a professional manuscript as that makes the reading experience much more enjoyable. And in the end, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it.

Progress Report:
“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress: 2nd Edition submitted for publication on Amazon.com (Pending clearance)

“Burt’s Bots” Novel Outline progress:
Outline:  1,777 words  (Getting the story down first)
Novel 1st Draft:  19,463 (Went back to outlining 1st though, and will complete outlining before continuing.)

Unpublished,…for Now

Sad Face amongst Happy Faces

This is definitely not my favorite blog post. In this article I must admit a mistake. After having started an analysis of my previous published novel, “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.“, I’m still happy in general with the book I produced, but not happy with the quality of the product I unleashed upon the world. In my defense, writing a novel is a massive undertaking that people don’t truly appreciate, nor understand the level of work involved to make it happen. To be honest, to some extent, I have to include myself in that category. I had put in many hours to write this novel, but was only able to do it sporadically, in stints here and there, followed by long pauses do to other life demands. That’s not the best way to write a novel, by far.

I found myself having to get back on track each time I would reengage the project, which only caused things to move slower, and made the rewrite of the 1st draft much more work than it would have otherwise been. After outlining the novel initially, I decided I wanted to try some dictation software to see if I could write faster that way. I was surprised that I was in fact able to write at a much faster pace than when I typed in my ideas,.. and I’m not a slow typist. Thinking I would exponentially speed up my progress, I happily proceeded using the astounding software for many multiple chapters. The downside,.. sometimes the software would hear words that I didn’t say, or maybe didn’t pronounce clear enough for it to perfectly interpret. I was of the mindset, then, and probably still am, that it’s best to just get out your creativity on the first draft and just edit it later to a better state of coherency. That seems to be a relatively popular approach that many writers use, so I ran with it.

I believe the initial creative process is probably the most fun part of writing a novel for most people. The re-write is less thrilling, but an incredibly important part of creating a quality product that people will enjoy. When re-writing the first draft of “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.“, I found an incredible amount of errors, at least for my taste. The voice dictation software worked very well for the most part, accurately reflecting the words I’d spoken into it. But every now and then, it would populate words that would ruin the meaning of the sentence. This left me with a manuscript riddled with minute errors to fix. Words that a writer never would have intentionally written into sentences, but which needed to be fixed.

Another aspect of the 1st Draft rewrite was the normal consequence of starting and stopping the project so many times over the years, and yes,.. I did say years. When I did a blog post that memorialized that I’d started my novel project over 4 years ago, that really hit home. At that point I was very motivated to complete the project and was in the midst of the rewrite. I found plot lines that were mixed out of order or repeated, as I didn’t remember I’d covered something the last time I’d written. Character names were interchange occasionally and phrasing was sometimes awkward. There were a lot of things to clean up, but to be fair, that’s to be expected when your first draft efforts are mainly to get that story on paper.

So I worked on the rewrite, and I fixed a lot of errors, polishing things as I went. I was able to catch a lot of issues, but discovered an interesting thing in the process. I’m not sure if this is a characteristic of my my own brain or if others experience it as well, but I would sometimes find that I would read a sentence as intended, and not as it was. I’d think that a word was there as I’d expect it to be, but it wasn’t. I’d read again and found the error. This was a rare thing to find, but when you have even a small number of such occurrences, and multiply them by 80,000 + words, you’re going to have errors that remain.

I’d considered and priced the possibility of using a professional proofreader, and would have loved to opt for this as my third phase of the project to make sure everything was in good order, but the cost was too high. The lowest cost I could find for my humble novel project was one thousand dollars. I was under no illusion that my one novel, amongst thirty million other books on Amazon.com, would become a best seller and I’d be soon fending off multiple movie option deals. Given that, it seemed too much to remove this amount from my family reserves just for my book. So I set out to do the job myself, and I corrected a lot of issues.

After that process, I was anxious to make my dream a reality and publish my book,… and so I did. And this brings me to the mistake I made. I have to admit now, with a heavy heart, that I rushed the publication process a little too quickly. After having worked on “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” for so long, I just wanted it out there, but I should have waited. After a reader noted they found a “do” which should have been a “due”, I was mad at myself for having missed that. He said there weren’t as many errors as he’d seen in other independent books, but it was something mentioned in his otherwise positive review. He’d actually given the book a four star review, but I knew at that moment, the product,… my novel,… was not what it should have been for that reader. So I fixed that typo, thinking it was likely just one of the many issues that I just happened to miss fixing, but the thought that there could be more, dogged me for weeks.

So at one point, I grabbed a hard copy of my novel and began to reread it with a more critical eye to see if there were additional issues remaining. While there many pages without any issues, there were far too many where some remained. As I continued, I came across a “teeth” that should have been a “teach” and at that point, was starting to feel a bit demoralized. The dictation software had got me again, and when I’d reviewed it, I apparently saw what I expected, instead of the word that was actually on the page. I was too close to the project and the writing to proofread it effectively in one pass.

As it’s become clear now, I should have done one or two new passes over the book to ensure all typos and errors had been fixed. Either that, or hire a profession proofreader who would see any flaws given they were emotionally distant from the project. While I”m not exactly a perfectionist, I owe anyone who might read my novel in the future a better experience, and have thus decided to unpublish my novel for now. I’ve taken “Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” off of all the markets it was available in for now. As there’s still some work to do, I’ll do my very best to make my novel the very best it can be and will republish it in the future.

Definitely NOT my favorite blog post.

Progress Report:
“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress: DONE, but now Unpublished [Additional proofreading project started.]

“Burt’s Bots” Novel Outline progress:
Outline:  1,777 words  (Getting the story down first)
Novel 1st Draft:  19,440 (Went back to outlining 1st though, but delayed for additional proofreading of 1st novel.)

It’s Official,… Nerdville has Arrived

So I recently discovered that my old computer glasses prescription was pretty much the same as my new one, leaving me suddenly with the ability to leave a pair at work and at home for my writing station. The old glasses were still in good shape, but the rims around the lenses were thin, although titanium.

To my surprise one day, I simply adjusted them on my head and heard a click. I soon realized what had happened when both lenses drooped to the side independently. My new found freedom of two computer glasses was literally breaking in two before my eyes.

As I sat there, holding both sides of my glasses awkwardly in my two hands, I had to laugh as the old movie “Revenge of the Nerds” came to mind and I seriously considered finding white first aid tape to fix them with. After all, no one would see me wearing them except my wife. No! I thought quickly, as I needed to still have my dignity, especially around my wife.

So what to do,.. throw away some perfectly good lenses? Heaven forbid. There had to be a better way to save these noble spectacles. Being into the SciFi genre, and having done a few electrical projects in my time, my thoughts went to a more permanent solution, perhaps involving solder. But as I soon found out, titanium doesn’t solder that easily, especially with an epoxy coating. I also realized that even if it did, it wouldn’t be that strong a bond, so I decided to add a copper wire binder to bridge the two sides together. With some help from my wife, who’s particularly skilled in the intricite art of wrapping wire tightly, I was able to solder my old glasses together again. The copper wire bonded excellently with the solder and I was back in business.

Granted,.. it’s not pretty, but it worked, and I have my home computer glasses back. My wife is still able to accept me wearing these while I work, especially since she assisted in making it happen, and my dignity is still intact,… somewhat.

Now,.. back to work.

Progress Report:
“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress: DONE, published

“Burt’s Bots” Novel Outline progress:
Outline:  1,603 words  (Getting the story down first)
Novel 1st Draft:  13,367 (Went back to outlining 1st though)


My New Scrivener, Version 3

I wrote my first novel, Inheriting S.O.F.I.A., using Scrivener Version 2 software. I’d considered using a standard word processing program like Microsoft’s Word ® but after doing some research, I found that many writer’s loved Scrivener.

Scrivener was created by writers, for writers. That’s the tag line, but it really shows in how the program is set up. Both my old Scrivener 2 version and the newer 3.0 version give you the areas you need to Outline, have your character sketches handy, location information, research information, and of course, your actual manuscript. Everything is just a click away so when you need to remember what you called that thing-a-majig or what was the name of the town your main character was raised, it’s all just a click away. It is also allows you to customize the category folders as needed. In my last novel, that came in handy as I needed to keep track of quite a few different inventions so I made a special folder I could quickly go to to keep them all straight.

Here’s where I have to admit that I never really considered myself a Scrivener 2 expert. I’d use it’s features fairly well, and even go to the point in the end where I could compile my manuscript into a novel, but some of the functions weren’t as intuitive as I’d like them to have been. So when it was announced that they finally were going to offer a new Scrivener version 3,.. I was definitely interested. When I’d heard they’d done a lot of work on the interface to make it more intuitive to use, my interest was peaked, and so I bit the bullet and bought the upgrade.

Initially, this was a little nerve wracking as I already had my first novel and a lot of the second novel I’ve been working on in the version 2 software, and this was a major version change. Once downloaded, though, it converted the old files perfectly and I breathed a sigh of relief.

In Scrivener 3.0, I did find the same familiar feel to things so my writing efforts weren’t slowed down a bit, but I also did enjoy an improved interface. New features like the writing history function and a better compiling process really have made the upgrade worth it for me. They also have a lot of how to videos to walk you through the new version on their Literature & Latte site.

While I’m loving the new version, it’s not so much of a change that it’s distracting from my work, as I haven’t mastered version 3 by any stretch of the imagination yet, but I do think this will be easier to learn its many features than the older version. I’ll write more about it as I discover and utilize more of its options, but for now, I”ll just say I’m a Scrivener 3.0 believer.

Progress Report:
“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress: DONE, published

“Burt’s Bots” Novel Outline progress:
Outline:  1,493 words  (Getting the story down first)
Novel 1st Draft:  13,367 (Went back to outlining 1st though)

To Write,.. or Bike,.. How About Both?

With this new year comes a new way of furthering my writing aspirations while also benefiting me in another way as well. Part time novelists need to find creative ways to make their time count as it’s a constant battle to balance the demands of your day job, everyday life and the need to write.

One of those everyday life components is to take care of one’s health, and unless you work in a job where you get plenty of exercise, many of us need to seek this out intentionally. That’s often the rub as needing the time for other things, like sleeping, eating and writing, often competes with the need to exercise. This also provides a convenient excuse to put off exercising, if I’m honest about things, which I always am on my blog.

Enter an idea that I first looked at as somewhat goofy,.. again, being honest about it,.. but the more I thought about the concept, the more ingenious I thought it could be. What if I could exercise AND write my newest novel at the same time? Game changer,.. I thought! Two driving motivations at the same time. That early morning hour could be filled with the exercise I need for my body to be healthy, and the writing time I need to work on my next novel. One effort to preserve my health, the other to explore my creativity. Both fulfilling life needs and both motivations helping to support each other.

So off to Amazon I went, and after much consternation over which would be the right purchase for me, I settled on the Excerpuetic ExerWork 1000. I’m sure there was a 2000 version that would be even better to use, but I haven’t optioned any novel to Hollywood yet, so the 1000 version it would be. With some minor assembly required, I found a small spot in a room to set it up, with plenty of plug access, and I was in business. Apart from a small detour when we had relatives come over for the holidays, this has become a functional alternative that allows me to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

Now that I have things put back in order again I’m going to do my best to make this a normal routine so that I can get both benefits at the same time. Another positive motivating factor to get me from point A, to the point of this whole exercise, which is to complete my next novel, Burt’s Bots. Here’s to my goal of success for me in both of these areas in the coming year.

Progress Report:
“Inheriting S.O.F.I.A.” Novel Progress: DONE, published

“Burt’s Bots” Novel Outline progress:
Outline:  1,399 words  (Getting the story down first)
Novel 1st Draft:  13,367 (Went back to outlining 1st though)